Goblin Squad Member
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I have hundreds of items, recipes and resources sitting idly in the bank; I am sure I am not the only one. I would put these on the AH, if it weren't so futile right now.
If they would increase AH posting time to 14 days or some, and add a "hide empty" filter, I think we would see a huge boost in Trading and Transport, and the increased player-traffic between towns that would come with that(hey, maybe even some PvP). Seems like a no brainer to get the game started.
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Seriously though, I know you have time frame issues and payroll to deal with but you should consider hiring some computational math/economy wiz full-time who can help sort out all the finer details related to the economic systems, AH, and the up-coming contract and caravan systems.
I'm starting to think that the whole idea of building the absolute smallest team possible to deliver content as inexpensively as possible is starting to show signs of buckling.
The AH doesn't need to be grade A awesome on day 1 of EE, but if players have to spend more than a few minutes looking for more than 1 specific item they are looking for then that is wasted time, energy, and frustration on the players behalf even IF they are able to find what they are looking for at the location they are currently in.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I have hundreds of items, recipes and resources sitting idly in the bank; I am sure I am not the only one. I would put these on the AH, if it weren't so futile right now.
If they would increase AH posting time to 14 days or some, and add a "hide empty" filter, I think we would see a huge boost in Trading and Transport, and the increased player-traffic between towns that would come with that(hey, maybe even some PvP). Seems like a no brainer to get the game started.
Yes, that would be ideal.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Searching for a specific item that you want to buy isn't really a special case, it's business as usual for the average player living in a settlement. I would consider traveling merchants looking for any item selling low compared to another market to be the unusual case. Sure, the system should work for you, too, but if your potential customers find the whole system too frustrating to bother with, then customers and merchants all lose.yes perhaps the interface is functional for this very special case, but there is several other cases which is not working, for travelling merchants ... which in one way or another will be very important. So perhaps we can leave the instances where the AH work, and look at the bit where it don't work ...eh?The search is fine but you want to break it down first. So if I want to find Basic strips +1 I click the "Crafting" button first, then the "Refined" button, then the "Tier 1" button, then up in the search window I type 'basic'. Boom, done, easy peasy. You just need an idea of what you are looking for.
I don't necessarily need exactly a +3 diminishing wand. If that is not available I could buy a different +3 wand, or buy a +2.
Knowing what is available without having to check each variant of the items for me is a big time saver.Or maybe I need several different raw materials. seeing at a glance that we have iron but not coal in our AH and how much of it can change my actions and choices.
I can choose to buy the iron and go to another settlement to buy the coal and then transport it here. I can choose to go to another settlement to buy both coal and iron there, I can decide to buy the iron and try to gather coal or I can decide to buy the +1 steel ingots I wanted to make because I see that they are available.
If I have to check: coal available/not available, iron available/not available, maybe steel ingots +0, +1, +2, +3 available/not available I will be forced to spend a lot of time before I get to know what options are available.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Seriously though, I know you have time frame issues and payroll to deal with but you should consider hiring some computational math/economy wiz full-time who can help sort out all the finer details related to the economic systems, AH, and the up-coming contract and caravan systems.
I'm starting to think that the whole idea of building the absolute smallest team possible to deliver content as inexpensively as possible is starting to show signs of buckling.
The AH doesn't need to be grade A awesome on day 1 of EE, but if players have to spend more than a few minutes looking for more than 1 specific item they are looking for then that is wasted time, energy, and frustration on the players behalf even IF they are able to find what they are looking for at the location they are currently in.
Or GW can struck a deal with CCP and copy their market.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Seriously though, I know you have time frame issues and payroll to deal with but you should consider hiring some computational math/economy wiz full-time who can help sort out all the finer details related to the economic systems, AH, and the up-coming contract and caravan systems.
I'm starting to think that the whole idea of building the absolute smallest team possible to deliver content as inexpensively as possible is starting to show signs of buckling.
The AH doesn't need to be grade A awesome on day 1 of EE, but if players have to spend more than a few minutes looking for more than 1 specific item they are looking for then that is wasted time, energy, and frustration on the players behalf even IF they are able to find what they are looking for at the location they are currently in.
Or GW can struck a deal with CCP and copy their market.
The EVE market works but it is clunky and easily exploited and traders still rely an awful lot on external community created tools that access the api and do cache scraping like EVEMON and EVE-Central.
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Goblin Squad Member
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About searching
If you are interested in iron as raw material, then this still leaves you with 4 options.
Degraded, Impure, Standard and True Iron that you need to check.
Also search terms sometimes just don't work.
Try iron - works as expected for raw material and for armor.
Try +3 - In crafting it works. Try it as search term in any of the other fields (armor, weapon, implement, wearable or consumable) and you get exactly zero hits.
Correction - the search term +3 works for recipes but not for refined goods. So even in crafting it doesn't always work. If you are interested in any +4 or +5 your only option is browse and click unless someone comes up with something clever.
Just tried 3 as search term - or '+3' or "+3" - I can't get it working. Too many hits ? I don't know.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The +0 I can make myself. +3 help you to do + weapons or other gear. If you have a variety of +1 and +2 recipes yourself then the +3 are the most valuable ingredients to make +2 overall.
So +3 I'm interested in all I can't refine myself. +2 I'm only interested if I can't make it myself and no +3 is available as well. +1 is even less interesting and +0 only in rare circumstances.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since every refined item could have a +3 available, why would you search in such a way? It makes far more sense to look for the type of refined items you need and then check the +3 versions of those items.
Only if you are a small scale hobby crafter.
A lot of the comments here about the AH are from people who eventually want to get into large scale industry and trade.
The current AH sort of works OK for someone wandering around doing a bit of PvE maybe some PvP and crafting a few bits of armor and a few weapons just to try the crafting out but is not suited to anyone serious abut any sort of trading on a scale.
At one stage a few weeks back I was regularly buying any AH recipe, any AH spell and any +3 refined mat which was at an ok price twice a day and then making and selling +2/+3 weps, +2/+3 armor, +3 holy symbols, +3 focuses and a batch of other stuff. Just checking the recipes to see what was available could take 30 minutes.
I was making about 10,000 to 15,000 c every few days but the time invested because of the clunky interface eventually made it too much hassle.
If the market is so difficult as to require a third party software product to make it useful, it has failed. It should work fully from within the game.
And if it becomes 'work' to use it, game has essentially translated into grind.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The EVE tools third party tools allow you to check all the markets in all the galaxy at the same time, or select some portion of it. In a game where you can place an order in market some teens of light years away.
That kind of stuff is several orders of magnitude above what we can and need to do in PFO, for now.
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Goblin Squad Member
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As it is pretty easy for a dedicated settlement to manipulate the content and flow in the local AH (if the need be) to manipulate and seed misinformation. I see a global tool at the AH as a interesting tool for the longdistant merchies.
The same info will be gathered by using a network of alts and such, even if it isn't web tools available.
If there is a possibility to limit the existence of third party web tools, there would perhaps be possible to limit the AHs range by tying it to the Settlements level/reputation/whatever in some way?
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Goblin Squad Member
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The EVE tools third party tools allow you to check all the markets in all the galaxy at the same time, or select some portion of it. In a game where you can place an order in market some teens of light years away.
That kind of stuff is several orders of magnitude above what we can and need to do in PFO, for now.
They do a lot more than that. Some simple examples:
- allow you to enter any two systems and the hold capacity of your ship. Then parse every sale in your departure system and every buy order in your destination system (literally tens of thousands of listed items) and calculate the most profitable consignment to purchase and calculate how much per jump you will make on the trip
- allow you to emter a trade hub and then compare mission corporations and determine which mission agents will return the biggest profit when trading items obtained with mission reward points (LP)at that hub
- calculate the most profitable level to refine planetary materials and which hub to sell them at for the most profit
The list could go on. Even the ingame market history includes indicators like Donchian Channels and the market system includes things like a limited (and scammable) form of margin trading and a fairly sophisticated (but also scammable) contract system.
But you are correct we do not need this level of sophistication yet.
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If there is a possibility to limit the existence of third party web tools ...
Impossible. There is no way to limit third party market tools.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If there is a possibility to limit the existence of third party web tools ...Impossible. There is no way to limit third party market tools.
I don't know enough to even ask the right kind of questions I belive, but I guess you misunderstood me. I was thinking of limit the information at the source, not limit the producers of tools.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It should work fully from within the game.
Ryan agrees:
Pathfinder's take on sandbox economics sounds interesting, and very much like Eve, at first glance. Perhaps too much like Eve in the sense of the speed and miraculous availability of information the description implies to me.
Information will propagate instantly, whether it is done in-game or out-of-game. It's trivially easy to ensure that you have up-to-the-second pricing and availability info anywhere that you care about by using alts.
So rather than put players who don't understand that at a disadvantage, we'll just provide those tools to everyone automatically.
RyanD
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I don't know enough to even ask the right kind of questions I belive, but I guess you misunderstood me. I was thinking of limit the information at the source, not limit the producers of tools.
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If there is a possibility to limit the existence of third party web tools ...Impossible. There is no way to limit third party market tools.
Also impossible (without crippling users). It might be possible to make it hard to parse that data, which will limit the use of those tools to people who put the effort into scraping that information.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was thinking of limit the information at the source...
Limiting the information at the source would mean blocking players from seeing it while browsing the Auction House.
I learned quite a bit about this kind of thing in Vanguard, where botting was widespread and the GMs generally looked the other way. The game server has to send data to your client so you can see what's available in the AH while you're browsing. That data can and will be intercepted by third party hacks.
For the record, I'll have nothing to do with that kind of thing in PFO unless Goblinworks officially and explicitly blesses it.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The problem with limiting the access of outside applications to game data is its a bit like plugging holes in a rusty roof.
Commonly data is gathered by supplying players with a useful app of some sort that then exports their API data or scrapes the game cache on their client for any data downloaded as they have been playing. Those things are easy enough to limit by controlling the APIs and encrypting the caches I suppose. Problem is there are probably dozens of other ways to get the same data so you would be always chasing your tail.
The other question is do you really want to limit publicly available free third party tools? In a sense the people developing these apps are adding functionality to your game for free. EVE is in the process of going the other way and allowing third party app developers direct access to the live game data.